Читать книгу Inexpressible Island - Paullina Simons - Страница 17

MIA BRINGS HIM A MUG OF HOT TEA FROM THE REFRESHMENT truck. Julian must look as if he needs it.

“Where are you really from?” she says, looking at him calmly but questioningly. “Forgive me for saying this, but you look like this was your first bombing.”

“No, no, not my first,” he says hurriedly. “But I told you, I’ve been away. Just came back recently.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Mia says. “We all did. We had to. What a time to come back, though. Why didn’t you stay where you were? Where were you, Wales?” she asks, sparing him an answer. “Bet it was safer.”

“It’s true, Mia, there are magical dangers here,” Julian says. “But this is our last stand.”

“By our, you mean London, right? Not …” She flicks her finger between him and her and smiles, like a joke. And he forces a smile in return, like a joke also.

They remain at the site until almost daybreak. Eventually the fire brigades arrive and the police, and the rescue services, who remove the possessions from the blasted-out homes. The Incident Officer appears in an enormous truck. Finch works closely with the IO and without Finch’s meticulous itemization of damages, the IO’s job would be much harder. Finch is indefatigable. Hours after the all clear, he is still interviewing people, taking down information, even comforting them occasionally, if awkwardly. He tags what’s been found, he lists what’s been lost. He catalogs everything. He is like a less genius and less genial George Airy.

“Finch does this every night?” Julian asks Mia, a grudging respect creeping into his voice.

“Day and night,” she replies. “This is his full-time job. He gets paid by the Bethnal Green Council. There’s bombing during the day, too. You don’t know that either, East Ender? When did you get here, yesterday?”

“Hardy-har-har.” Sipping the tea that has cooled down much too quickly, Julian chortles and sputters, pretending her question is a rhetorical jest. Daytime attacks, too? Julian thought Wild had been exaggerating.

After the anarchy of the bombing, the organized, measured response to the madness makes Julian feel worse, even more out of sorts. He is used to punch for punch, slam for slam, kick for kick. He is not used to clipboards and quiet conversation after a wholesale demolition, not used to pale slim cordial indispensable women casually sifting through the debacle on a stranger’s behalf, looking for lost dolls and pearls.

In the blue icy pre-dawn, things look more surreal, not less.

The IO’s men spend hours loading the truck with items that have been recovered and tagged to haul to the storage depot or the “strong room.” Mia, Julian, Finch and Duncan continue to bring the valuables out into the street, one by one, little by little, precious toys, a fire truck, an heirloom Bible. Mia advises the dispossessed families to keep what’s most dear to them on their person, not to lose sight of it. The face she presents to the families is one of unflagging optimism and kindness. It’s going to be okay, she keeps saying. Your things will be found. The council will find you a new place to live. The shelters are warm and there’s food. Don’t worry. Keep your chin up. Don’t panic.

She’s a far cry from the frightened and desperate woman Julian found in Invercargill. Mia lives amid death, yet has not been ruined by the knowledge of her own death. Poor Shae, Julian thinks, bowing his head as if in prayer.

Julian, you’re a fool.

The Inferno is no place for pity.

In the past, he tried to look too far ahead, and now he’s being punished by being unable to look ahead even one more day.

Punished or rewarded?

We may be hopeless, Mia. But we’re not broken.

“Who are you praying for, Julian?” Mia says, coming up to him. The face she presents to him, too, is one of unflagging optimism and kindness.

His expression must confuse her, because she averts her gaze. “Do you want to sit, rest your feet a bit? You look exhausted. They’ll be okay, they’re used to it,” she says when she sees him scanning for Duncan and Wild. “Let’s sit.”

He and Mia huddle on the debris. Now that the fires have been doused and there’s hardly any warmth, the slush is turning to ice. Julian wants to put his arm around her. She seems so cold. He gauges how far Finch is from them, whether he can see them. He’s quite far and paying them no attention, but Julian decides not to antagonize the man any more than necessary, though he yearns to draw her to him, to embrace her.

“Maybe we should all go inside the strong room,” Julian says, “and leave the trinkets outside.”

“Why, are you tired of living?” She says it in jest.

“I’m not not tired,” he replies, wanting to fall asleep right then and there, on top of a crumbled house, next to her. He has been in the river, in the dry beds, in the tunnels, in the flames, awake for weeks or days. “What are we waiting for?”

“Finch,” Mia says. “It’s at least another hour before he’s done. He drives us back.”

Julian’s head bobs forward. Feeling her gaze on him, he shakes to stay alert.

“You got nowhere to go,” she asks. It’s not a question.

“I got nowhere to go.”

“So come back with us. We have room. The more, the merrier. Come back.”

What Julian wants is for her to go with him. Come with me, Mia. Come away with me. Away from this madness.

But come with him where, the hospital in Scutari, the demon fire, the deepest ocean? “Are you sure?” he says. “You look pretty full up at Bank. And your boyfriend doesn’t like me.”

“Can you blame him?” Mia smiles, self-aware but jokey. “Don’t worry, you’ve made a friend in Wild. You’ll be fine. He loves the girls but doesn’t usually take to the boys like he’s taken to you.”

“There’s no place for me,” he says.

“Sure, there is,” she says. “At night, you’ll be with us, and during the day you can sleep in Robbie’s bunk. He leaves for work at seven.”

“What about you, where do you sleep?”

“Who wants to know?” She smiles. “Just kidding. You saw where. One of the top bunks is mine. All the girls are in the top bunks.”

They exchange a glance. “For safety?” he asks.

She nods. “At Bank, we haven’t had any problems with assaults and whatnot—touch wood, as Mum would say—but other places have had some trouble, and it’s always better to be safe.”

Always better to be safe, says the fragile girl whose life has been threatened and snuffed out up and down the centuries, now sitting in the rubble caused by high explosives, the rubble to which she has traveled out of her soul’s own free will.

“You don’t have a house in London,” Julian asks, “a family?”

“I had both,” Mia replies. “The house got bombed, the family left. Of course I could go to a proper rest center up on Old City Road, but they’re overcrowded, and I don’t want to stand in the street all day with my blanket, queueing for a space. Finch and I did that back in September. Bollocks to that, we said after a day.” Mia takes out a cigarette, offering one to Julian. At first he refuses, and then accepts. Why not? They light up. Her lighter says sad girls smoke a lot.

“You don’t seem sad,” Julian says, inhaling the smoke, coughing, inhaling again.

Mia concurs. “I’m not sad. But the girl who died, she was sad. It was hers.”

“Why was she sad?”

“Because she died.”

He likes the camaraderie of smoking with his beloved over bombed-out ruins in a war. In the war. It’s not the worst thing they’ve shared, by far. “None of you has a home?”

“Robbie has a home,” Mia replies. “In Sussex. Liz has a home in Birmingham. But those places are getting hit pretty hard. Phil Cozens has a home, but he doesn’t sleep there, because he’s paid to be on call at Bank. It’s not too bad at Bank, really. You’ll see. They’ve spruced up many of the Underground shelters. Bank is like a fine hotel. There’s even a refreshment center.” She smiles wistfully, glancing down the street for the refreshment truck that’s long left.

“Do you work?” Julian asks. “Or is this your day job, too?”

Mia has a different day job. She works at the Lebus Furniture Factory on Tottenham Court Road. She sleeps until ten or eleven in the morning and then goes in. Her boss doesn’t mind; he knows why she is up all night.

“Do you work?” she asks, looking inside Wild’s cloak at Julian’s well-made suit, now dusty.

“I did. I had a restaurant on Great Eastern Road. It’s gone now. Along with my flat right above it.”

“Restaurant? I’m so hungry,” she says. “What kind of food did you make, Cornish pasties? Shepherd’s pies?”

“Beef noodle soup. Squid with garlic. Shrimp rolls.”

“Tell me about it. Don’t spare any details.”

When Finch spots them sitting on the broken pile next to each other, he looks upset, even at a distance, even in the early light. But Julian takes the cue for how to behave from Mia. She doesn’t move away from him. So he doesn’t move away from her. Julian is not the keeper of her relationship with Finch. If he’s overstepping his bounds, she’ll let him know. But Julian doesn’t think he is overstepping. Something about the way she kissed him back when they pretended to be Cecily and Algernon. As if she had been longing to be truly kissed.

While they wait for Finch to finish up, Mia tells Julian bedtime stories, and he nearly falls unconscious to the sound of her achingly familiar soft breathy voice. She’s known most of the Ten Bells gang since primary school. She, Shona, and Finch grew up together on Folgate Street in the back of Spitalfields Market, and in September were made homeless together. For the first few weeks, they roamed the streets like beggars, and then found the passageway at Bank.

Shona, the medi truck driver, is a tough cookie, while Liz Hope is the opposite. “She is a soft cookie. Like a sponge cake.” Liz began a promising, bookish career at the British Museum, but now that the Museum has shuttered indefinitely for the war, she’s out of a job and out of sorts. Sometimes she volunteers for the church truck, serving refreshments to the dislocated, but mostly feels she’s not doing enough. “She can’t help it,” Mia says. “People are not going to change just because of a little bombing. The truth is, Liz is terrified of the bombs. Going out into the darkness during the attacks is not an option for her.”

Liz seems like the sanest of the bunch. “Why can’t you be more like Liz,” Julian says.

“You mean chaste and shy?” Mia is grimy yet shiny. She smiles. Every time Mia smiles, Finch manages to see it from wherever he is. Maybe because she lights up like a firework.

“I mean safe and underground,” Julian says. “But chaste and shy, too, if you want, sure.”

“You want me to hide from life in the dungeons?”

“Not from life,” he says. “From death.”

“There’s nowhere to hide,” she says. “A month ago, a bomb fell near the entrance at Bank. It killed twenty people and left a crater in the road so large it had to be spanned by a makeshift bridge. The Bank of England was untouched, though.”

“Maybe we should hide inside the Bank of England.” Julian says we but he means you.

Liz likes being part of the squad, Mia says, but because of her agonizing shyness has a hard time speaking up in a group setting. And a group setting is how they live these days. There is no private setting.

“So how do you and Finch make it work?” Julian asks, looking at his hands instead of at her. “In a group setting,” he adds carefully.

There is a longish pause. “Biding our time is how,” she replies. She returns to talking about Liz, glossing over his silence with a brisk “What option do we have?” as if she can read his thoughts.

Who’s got the time to stay put, to linger?

Not you.

Last week, Robbie started taking Liz to work with him on Fleet Street. She now proofs his articles for the Evening Standard. She’s never had a boyfriend but has had a paralyzing crush on Wild for years, and after his accident last summer, if anything, loves him even more because he is less perfect and therefore more accessible to her and therefore more perfect.

Wild’s real name is Fred Wilder. “Isn’t that funny? Wild is Freddie. He’s been trying to rebel against his plumber name since birth.” As if the moniker weren’t punishment enough, his parents had named his younger brother Louis. “So one brother’s a plumber, the other a French king. I mean, that’s Wild’s life in a nutshell.”

“Where’s Louis?”

Mia shakes her head, glancing around for Wild, as if he might be nearby and can hear. “We don’t talk about Louis.”

“Ah,” Julian says. “Okay.” Beat. “So, tell me about you.”

“What about me?”

“You’ve told me about Liz, about Shona, about Wild. What’s your story?”

“I told you.”

“I mean, other than the war.”

“Is there anything other than the war?” she says. “I almost don’t remember.” Before the war, she strived for the West End stage, but that’s been put on hold, like everything. “Two bombings and my beloved Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus has been boarded up!” she says with indignation. “As if people don’t need entertainment during war. They need it even more, if you ask me.”

Julian agrees.

“Do you know that theatre?”

“I do,” he says. “Once upon a time, a man loved his wife so much, he built her the most magnificent theatre in all of London, so she could go to the grand opera any time she wanted.”

“Yes!” Mia exclaims, staring at him in amazement. “How do you know that? No one but me knows that.”

“And me.”

Warmed and softened, Mia tells him about her work at Lebus, the furniture factory, becoming especially animated when she describes what they’ve started building for the war. “We take the hollowed-out frames of double-decker buses and paint them red. No engines, no transmissions, just the frames.”

“Like the cargo cult planes in Melanesia,” Julian says pensively.

“The what?”

“Never mind. Continue. Why do you do that?”

“We paint on the fake windshields, the wheels, even the numbers on the buses,” Mia says, “and we place them around the outskirts of town, where they’re easy to spot. The Germans bomb our decoy buses, while inside the city, we get to carry on with our business.”

“Aha. Like building film sets. Except for real life.”

“Yes, precisely! Fake buses for real life.”

Julian and Mia continue to sit together on top of the crumpled exterior wall, hunched over, their feet on the window frames. They’re covered head to toe in mortar dust, even their faces and mouths. She tightens her headscarf under her wool hat, breathes into her gloved hands.

Her mother is up in Blackpool with her Aunt Wilma, her three cousins and their seven kids. Aunt Wilma is atypically British. She is not calm. When the bombs started falling in September on a daily basis, Wilma became hysterical. Her vocal panic traumatized her grandchildren, Mia’s second cousins. “And don’t think that my mum doesn’t mention every chance she gets that her sister is a grandmother seven times over and my mum not even once.” So Wilma packed up the family and shuffled off to Blackpool where their family is from.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” Why, why, didn’t you go with them.

“My life is here.” She draws the coat across herself. “I’m with my friends, so I don’t care. I’ll admit that when I first saw the Luftwaffe fly overhead with no Spitfires or Hurricanes in sight, I thought I was watching my own destruction.” She peers at him. “Kind of the way you’re acting today.”

Julian says nothing. His eyes lock with hers. “Like I’m watching whose destruction?” he says quietly.

Mia sputters and moves on. “The first bomb that hit our house blew the roof off,” she says.

“The first bomb?”

“Oh, yes. The brigade pulled my mum out from under the dining room table, the table fine, my mum fine, and she yells to me, Mia, I told you it was a good table!” The young woman smiles in remembrance. “The council said they could do nothing for us, and we should consider ourselves lucky that we had a roof over our heads, and I pointed up to the open sky and said, do you have eyes? What roof? The chap got mad and left.” She laughs. “After we got bombed, we got free refreshment for two days. At first, Mum said it was nice and we should get bombed more often. We had the Emergency Londoners’ Meal Service. We had our bath in the mobile bath units—I call it the human laundry—and did our washing in the mobile laundry that was parked a block away from us on Commercial Street. It was cold in our house without a roof, but it was still September so it wasn’t too bad, and we were together. Aunt Wilma was next door with her kids and her kids’ kids, and Mum liked that. Truth be told, I liked it, too. I’m close to Wilma’s youngest daughter, Kara. She and I were born the same year. She’s like my twin. She’s funny.”

“Funnier than you?”

“Like, who even could be?” Mia smiles. “But then a bomb fell on Wilma’s house, and all the wood and glass ended up in our living room, and then it rained for a week straight, and that wasn’t funny. So Mum agreed that maybe it was time to go and my aunt said, you think? After they left, I stayed for a few days alone in the house, but then another incendiary fell, and, well, you know.” Mia hops up and extends her hand to him. “You want to go see what’s left of my house? Come on. We still have a few minutes before Finch is done. It’s just around the corner.”

They hurry to Commercial Street. “The bombs have torn all the leaves off the trees,” Julian says. “That’s why it looks like winter.”

“Silly boy,” Mia says. “It looks like winter because it’s actually winter.”

Folgate Street is a short narrow road between two large wide thoroughfares, Bishopsgate and Commercial.

Not much is left of Folgate. Most of the two dozen homes are rubble except for the four corner ones. They have craters inside them, and only partial roofs, but families continue to live there. Even milk and newspapers continue to be delivered, the milk in tins.

In the middle of Folgate, Mia’s flattened house is black cinder and dust.

“Mum said she’d be back as soon as she had my aunt and cousins settled,” Mia says, “but I telegraphed her to say not to bother. Where is she going to go? She can’t live at Bank with me. I admit, I’m a little jealous of Lucinda and her family. Sure, Lucinda’s a nutter, but Sheila and Kate have their mum. It was nice when Mum and I were together and could wash our clothes in the laundry truck. Of course then the gal who’d been driving it died. Her lungs got filled with dust. It’s her lighter I’m using.” Mia smokes another cigarette as they walk back, slowly. “When my house collapsed, I walked away. Mum taught me to do that. She said, eyes forward, and never look back; otherwise, you’ll be carrying the weight of that house with you the rest of your life.”

If only Julian could heed that advice.

“What’s Wild’s story, Mia? Tell me quick, before we return.”

“Okay, but you can never tell him I told you,” she says. “He lost his arm when he was trying to save his brother. A bomb fell during one of the early attacks in July, and Louis got trapped in their burning house. Wild tried to get him out. Louis kept telling Wild to go, but Wild wouldn’t leave him. Then the wall frame shifted, and he got stuck. He couldn’t get even himself out. Wild watched his brother die as their house burned down around them. He barely escaped himself. The firemen had to cut off his arm to save his life. Their parents were outside in the street, while their two sons were trapped inside.”

Julian lowers his head.

“It wasn’t great,” Mia says. “It’s still not good. Being a fireman was all Wild wanted to be since we were kids, and now he’s got no brother, no arm, and can never be a fireman. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” says Julian.